After listening to Chris Hardwick, Jonah Rey, and Matt Mira interview Thomas Jane and his cat on The Nerdist Podcast, I felt like checking out the short Punisher red band fan flick made by Jane, who played the Punisher in 2004.
DO NOT WATCH if you are squeamish, at work, in the company of impressionable children, or have a wide variety of medical conditions.
With my background in evolutionary biology and genetics, it should be no surprise that I’m an advocate of variation. As an athlete, I really love seeing unconventional approaches to sports, especially because most sports involve so many variable that “solving” an truly optimal way to play is unlikely.
Convention and tradition are often held up by commentators as “the best” way to play because they appear to have survived the test of time. This is very true in football.
The conventions of football have almost never been put to the test. They do not reflect proven strategies for victory. They reflect strategies that are least likely to get the coach fired by the team owner or athletic director. Thus, almost every team in the United States punts on fourth down. A notable exception is Kevin Kelley at Pulaski Academy in Arkansas (notably, he is his own athletic director), who has been successful while refusing to punt or kick (104-19 with 3 state championships).
There may be a new, if limited, addition to this counter-culture. According to reports, San Diego State’s coach, Rocky Long, is considering “going for it” on fourth downs on his opponent’s side of the field. Continue reading “One small step for a coach, one giant leap for football?”
Despite my experiences of crushing boredom studying cell trafficking pathways in grad school, there was no way I was going to just walk past a book of poems titled Cell Traffic without stopping. In this delightful book, poet Heid E. Erdrich mixes themes of genetics, motherhood, ancestry, and Native American mythology to produce poetry that feels very relevant in a day when we can read information about our ancestry from the text of our DNA.
Today’s Sunday Poem is “Seven Mothers.” The title refers to the seven major, maternally inherited mitochondrial haplogroups popularized by Bryan Sykes in The Seven Daughters of Eve. Since Sykes’ book was published, we have developed a greater ability to use genetic variation in our nuclear DNA to trace our ancestry, and mitochondrial DNA now plays less of a role in our efforts to understand human ancestry than it once did. But it’s hard to beat the impact of mitochondrial maternal ancestry on our imaginations. Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: Mitochondrial Mothers”
My kids have a puzzle of “jungle creatures”.
I hate it1. I do not hate it because there is no jungle in the world in which these animals all live together2. Continue reading “That’s no monkey…”
Why are so many non-reproducible experiments so highly cited? Part of the problem may be a growing cultural change in biology: not everyone does experiments now. More and more, biologists are divided into experimentalists and computational biologists. (I hesitate to say theorists, because computational biologists don’t theorize about biology any more than experimental biologists.) The reason for this division is because, thanks to the growing availability of big data sets, it is possible to learn something new by analyzing already available data.
This is a positive development, but the risk is that we create a class of biologists who don’t understand the subtleties of the experiments that produced the data they work with. Continue reading “Not being an experimentalist is no excuse for not understanding experiments”
The Finch and Pea 